Portland - 'The open source capital of the nation'
Alex Howard interviewed Portland's mayor Sam Adams about the city's recent Civic Apps contest.
It's an interesting interview in which he explains the rational for the city's Open Data initiatives and the benefits it brings to residents of the city. Some quotes from the interview:
In Portland, like I think most cities, when people are armed with knowledge, they make wiser choices
For us, data has always been there, in some cases for decades. Putting it to use for the public and help people make money while they do it – we intend to be the open source capital of the nation – and this is one contribution we can make, with our data sets.
Some of the prize winning apps that make use of the City's data include:
- Cross-platform Group Messaging and Location Beaconing for Disaster Relief - a resource for citizens, medical teams and governments before, during and after disasters.
- PDX Trees - Find trees with Heritage Tree status
- Portland Bike to Transit Map - web map that helps you figure out how to ride your bike to transit
- CivicApps Data Previewer - A web application to preview any of the public geo data on CivicApps from your web browser.
- Pdxtrian - Helps riders of Portland's excellent mass transit system, TriMet.
- MyTriMet.com - designed to answer one simple question. Where's my bus?
- PDX Bus - isplays arrival times for public transport in Portland, Oregon
- pdxhash - is a scheme for geotagging locations in the Portland area with a short string made up of numbers and letters
- PDXAPI.com - website providing a JSON api to nicely formatted, developer friendly versions of the datasets provided at CivicApps.org.
- Clackamas County Fire/EMS twitter feed - Sends the most recent fire/EMS call in Clackamas County to a Twitter account.
For more, check Alex's blog-post at Govfresh.com and CivicApps.org
